Ferdinand Bruckner's play, set among the febrile Viennese youth of 1923, has been a fringe favourite for two decades. Now Martin Crimp's version of the play gets a revelatory revival by Katie Mitchell that relates it clearly to the new objectivity art movement which emerged in the German-speaking world in the 1920s. There's a clinical quality to it that shows how Bruckner's medical students were victims of a moral sickness that plagued post-first world war Europe.

The action is dominated by the sinister, Nietzschean figure of Freder who delights in causing destruction. He corrupts an innocent maid, feeds the suicidal tendencies of the bisexual, aristocratic Desiree, and finally turns his attention to her lover, Marie, off whom he hopes to live. "What's going to happen to us?" asks Desiree. The answer is all too clear. But Bruckner, who was to flee to Paris in 1933, foresees a decade earlier that the death-wish afflicting mittel-European youth provided the soil from which fascism would grow.

The danger lies in tilting the play towards expressionist extremism. But Mitchell's production shrewdly anchors it in Viennese actuality. Vicki Mortimer's boarding-house set has a Jugendstil, brown-and-white believability.

The performances imply neurosis rather than hysteria. Geoffrey Streatfeild's excellent Freder is a sober-suited control freak rather than the druggy vampire I have seen in other productions. Laura Elphinstone's Marie plausibly disintegrates, but she never lets you forget the character's innate middle-class qualities. Possibly the hardest part is Desiree, whom Lydia Wilson, straight out of drama school, rightly plays as a rootless girl who can see no alternative to bourgeois existence or suicide.

The succcess of Mitchell's revival, however, lies in taking a potentially overheated play and treating it as a forensic analysis of a doomed, death-haunted generation.